Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

6/15/15

Seeing Through Self: David Bohm & Krishnamurti's Ego

Quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) was a protégé of J. Robert Oppenheimer and liked by Einstein. So impressed was Einstein, that he referred to Bohm as his successor. As for Bohm, he had deep interests outside science. This led to the day when Bohm met J. Krishnamurti and began studying under him until the two men had a falling-out.
First, though, background on the physicist. In his work on plasma, Bohm was headed for a Nobel Prize before being blackballed by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy Red Scare era of the 1950s. As a naive Berkeley graduate student he had attended Communist party meetings for a few weeks, and joined the party before losing interest and dropping out. Loyal to his friends, as a Princeton professor he refused to give names before Congress and pleaded his Fifth Amendment rights. Under pressure from a wealthy donor, Princeton University let his contract lapse and refused to renew it. Eventually he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Jiddu Krishanamurti (1895-1986) was raised by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater to become the prophesied world teacher of the Theosophical Society, headquartered in Adyar, Chennai, India. As a young man, Krishnamurti turned his back on the Society and all organized religion, insisting that no dogma or doctrine could lead down the spiritual path to awakening. Ironically, he developed a profitable world-wide following, with his business headquarters in Ojai, California.

Alert to body and mental states since a child, Bohm had experiences for which he sought explanations. In both his physics and in his life, his momentum carried him in quest of a way to understand the universe as a whole. In other words, he did not see separation between science and life as people lived it. As part of his quest, he proposed a dialogue, now called Bohmian Dialogue, in which groups of people talk together to explore their assumptions of thinking, meaning, communication, and social effects. This, he felt, could bridge gaps of understanding so to help people communicate disparate views. Nondualist teacher Toni Packer, engages her sangha in a form of this discourse. The dialogue was an expression of his belief that if only they could understand their lives, people would see how all was part of a seamless web. Wholeness and The Implicate Order, one of his books, reflects this belief. Because of his view, he was drawn to Krishnamurti.

Bohm allowed that Krishnamurti might be on to something he, Bohm, could not discern. Just as he believed in dialogue to gain understanding so he allowed that perhaps some people do have realizations to which most are not privy. This was partly due to his own understanding, for Bohm argued that at the most primitive level we perceive movement. Motion, both scientifically and conceptually, is prior to the idea of a separate space and a separate time. In Bohm’s The Special Theory of Relativity (1965) he demonstrated an Einsteinian world in harmony with our deepest modes of perception. As we grow, we learn to separate the world into that reflected by classical physics. To get at a true understanding of physics, one had to peel away the layers of cognition that present a divided world. Krishnamurti, he thought, could help him in this deconstruction.

Just as Einstein had to reconceive the world, Bohm believed he had to
do so also. Like Einstein in bold departure from the conventional, Bohm
took the leap to unconventional vantages. In his life, Bohm had experiences he could not explain
with common
sense, and so to understand the universe as a whole, he became
Krishnamurti’s disciple. Krishnamurti told Bohm to “start with the unknown,” by which he meant Bohm should see where knowledge arises. In Krishnamurti, Bohm believed he found a description of the problems of normative consciousness. Krishnamurti wrote, “When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion,” that self is fiction. Krishnamurti explained that the thinker is merely a powerless thought. As their relationship developed, Bohm helped Krishnamurti refine his teachings so that they gained in precision what they lost in poetry.

The two eventually had a falling-out. In this, Krishnamurti is instructive as to why some gurus lack credibility among serious, professional researchers of consciousness. One problem has to do with the explanations of the gurus. Many offer simplistic, even foolish, explanations for what has been termed “the higher consciousness.” Of Krishnamurti, David Bohm wrote Donald Schumacher, “More deeply, what is wrong with the ‘teachings’ is the prevalence in them of ‘always, forever, totality, sacred,' [and so on]. These words not only cannot be justified by the actual observation of fact, more important they radically disorganize the mind and fix it in a static and fragmented mode of activity.” (Infinite Potential, F.David Peat)

Bohm also became disenchanted with the man because he saw Krishnamurti manipulating words so he could never be challenged as mentor, a behavior common to some gurus. According to them, they never speak in error, but always from the absolute. Confronted with absolutisms, how can a student's relative perspective be anything but wrong? In my mind, Neo-Advaitan and fundamentalist Ramesh Balsekar, rife with contradiction, is a prime example. He claimed nothing can be done to awaken. You either get it or you don't. This in itself is one more concept, too narrow for the universe of human experience.

There was the public guru and the private man. Bohm felt betrayed to learn Krishnamurti slept with Nandini Mehta, the wife of Rajah, Krishnamurti's best friend. Here was no man of high moral purity. The private man was vain, prone to anger, and cruelty toward friends, as well as a compulsive liar.

His trust shattered, Bohm fell into deep depression, his third and final one. In a mental hospital, suffering thoughts of suicide, he underwent fourteen episodes of shock therapy before he recovered and returned to work at the university. He died at age 75 from a massive heart attack.

Despite their falling out, Bohm remained a believer that Krishnamurti was on to something. His guru had spoken of the ending of thought, at which point the mind becomes quiet so that, in silence, understanding is transformed, and one becomes Witness to what arises, both inside and outside, and at some point the Witness collapses so there is no longer an inside and outside, a seer and a seen. They become One without a Second, for there can be no second if all is one.

Still, toward the end of his life, Bohm began to question Krishnamurti's explanations. He asked, “What is it that observes this nondualistic state? What is it that observes consciousness?” He speculated that this new mode of consciousness might be merely another variation of thought.

What Bohm did not grasp is this: one's true nature. There can be seeing without a perceiver, which is outside perception but indelible when full awakening occurs.. Whatever the language, whatever the religion, or lack therof, whatever the narrative, whatever the century, this remains as the universal feature, however it is recalled in words.

As for no-self, a "lower level" discovery, in a way neuroscience provides materialist support for Krishnamurti, who said the self cannot be found when looked for. What people call self cannot be located by fMRI in the brain and is assumed to be another layer, an overseer function of neurons that had some kind of evolutionary value. Of course this absence comes as no surprise to nondualist masters. The self is an illusion: Zen roshis urge students to investigate to discover its fiction. That is a step along the way to realization, perhaps leading to liberation.

Bohm finally conceded that mental investigation would not yield an answer. Scientific reason and doubt worked in other realms but not in this. He allowed that perhaps, just perhaps, something else had to happen, something beyond his control through reason and objective investigation. That, of course, is the nub of it, for something there indeed is beyond our control and it can be realized for some when they come to even see doubt as another mental impression, at which point liberation, or freedom from suffering, as it is called, might occur.

As for ego, a sense of self, it never wholly goes away, as evidenced in Krishnamurti, whose ego somehow justified improper or immoral behavior. To lose egoic identity is the point, and that is what Bohm did not grasp, perhaps because not fully realized by Krishnamurti, who spoke in sweeping terms about loss of self, rather than dis-identification as self. That is, anger, fear, whatever, will always arise. Stories will still be told: I like this; I don't like that; this sucks; that doesn't. The mind tells stories but release comes when it is seen, clearly seen, that there is no story-teller.

Bohm was right about Krishnamurti's behavior and rather rambling talk but another man was concise in describing the human malaise.

Terence Gray (1895-1986) wrote extensively about what was behind it. Gray was an Irish aristocrat, Eton and Oxford graduate, Egyptolist, and theatrical producer, whose cousin founded the Royal Ballet. He maintained a stable of racehorses, with his horse Zarathustra winning the 1957 Ascot Gold Cup.

In later life, he grew tired of it all, and turned to India and Ramanah Maharshi, among other teachers. Along the way he became Wei Wu Wei, meaning Action Non-Action. About freedom, Wei Wu Wei said this:

“Why are you unhappy?

Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.”

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John